We’re at Fox News headquarters in New York, sitting down to talk in a boring cube of a conference room a few floors below the studio where Hannity will later host the highest-rated show in all of cable news.

Hannity thinks most journalists are biased and rarely agrees to interviews. “How you got into the building,” he wonders aloud, “I have no idea.” When his show goes live in about two hours, he’ll be dressed in a jacket and tie, with an American flag pin affixed to his lapel. His hair will be sharply parted and carefully groomed. But that’s later. Right now, Hannity’s in jeans and a black shirt, and his hair looks as if he might have just taken off a baseball cap.

I ask him about the regular reports that he has daily conversations with the president of the United States — even, it has been suggested, that he is often the last person Donald Trump talks to at night.

“I don’t have a nightly call with anybody,” Hannity tells me. “I read these things about me that are total bullshit. Quote it. It’s just not true.”

So how much access to the president does Hannity have? That’s one of the few questions he won’t answer. “I really kind of enjoy that nobody knows, and I’m just going to leave it that way,” he says. “But I can tell you this: Nobody has ever gotten my relationship with Donald Trump right, ever.”

Hannity, like Trump, has built a loyal core of followers and frustrated his detractors with enduring success. And just like Trump, Hannity has experienced a rise to power few could have predicted. “A lot of people had written my obituary for November 9, 2016, if Donald Trump had lost,” he told me.

Hannity was a Fox News Channel original, hired by network chief Roger Ailes in 1996 to be the conservative counterpoint to Alan Colmes on Hannity & Colmes. When Colmes left the network in 2009, the show became Hannity, which turned into a fixture of one of the most successful and enduring prime-time lineups in modern television history.

That consistency collapsed shortly after Trump’s victory, when Megyn Kelly, seen as an heir apparent to Fox News star Bill O’Reilly, decamped to NBC. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, O’Reilly himself was forced out at
Fox amid a sexual harassment scandal, ending his two decades as the king of cable news. With the move coming just nine months after the exit of Ailes, Fox News’ founder — and the exit weeks later of 7 p.m. host Greta Van Susteren after 14 years — it was a time of shocking uncertainty for a network built on consistency.

Seemingly in an instant, it fell to Sean Hannity to step up, become the face of the network, and defend the most successful brand in cable news. Fox couldn’t count on the competition to be reliably less successful. At MSNBC, Rachel Maddow was capitalizing on the Trump presidency, building some of the highest ratings in her network’s history. “We lost 75% of our prime time,” Hannity said of that time. “And we’re still No. 1.”

Ratings data released today by Nielsen show that Hannity has more than kept the ship afloat. Ratings for July show he has cemented his position as the most powerful man in cable news, marking four consecutive months in first place — both in terms of total viewers (with an average audience in July of 3.4 million) and among adults 25-54, the demographic group most coveted by advertisers, where Hannity led with 635,000 viewers. Hannity’s ratings in July were so dominant, he led all of basic cable, even beating the 30th anniversary edition of Discovery’s ratings goliath Shark Week.

“I feel blessed to be in this business,” Hannity says. “I feel that I’ve gotten better at understanding the audience and understanding who I am. It’s just a part of natural maturity. I feel very strongly about my views, and I try to make my case every night.”

With his rise to the top — and his presumed access to Trump — the critics of Fox News have focused on Hannity, dissecting his show nightly and even investigating how he’s invested his money. Hannity insists his focus remains on his shows — Hannity on TV and The Sean Hannity Show, his syndicated radio show, which airs on 570 stations across the country and reaches 14 million listeners every week. It’s Hannity’s 30th year as a radio host, and he just unseated Rush Limbaugh as the most influential talk show host in radio.

I ask Hannity about his fiercely loyal — and growing — audience. “Irredeemable deplorables that cling to their Bibles and religion,” he says with a laugh before turning serious. “I have a natural passion that drove me into this business and gets me up in the morning. And the untold story about who I am ... is that I am the forgotten man, the forgotten woman.”

Hannity’s audience knows well the two decades Hannity spent living check-to-check as a bartender and contractor, framing houses, laying tile and hanging wallpaper. His first foray into talk radio was as a guy in his 20s, standing on a ladder listening to talk radio in Rhode Island and calling in to talk politics. “That’s what drives me,” Hannity says. He identifies with guys up on those ladders, now calling in to his show. “That’s who I am. I fight politically because the politics of the country impacts their lives.”

Does it weigh on him to be accused of using his platform to prop up President Trump, spread conspiracy theories and blur the line between news and rabid partisanship? “The amount of time I spend caring about it is zero. I don’t care,” Hannity says. “I try to be the most informed person I can be. We work really hard at getting things right, and I don’t mind being separate and apart from everybody else at all. In fact, I kind of relish it.”

While Hannity’s voice rises slightly when he talks politics — on and off the air — he wants people to know that, unlike the vast majority of journalists in his mind, he’s genuine and truly says what he believes. “They say they’re journalists, and I don’t believe they are. And that’s one of the reasons why I think the president has tapped into something by saying ‘fake news.’ They’re claiming to be something that they’re not.”

Hannity doesn’t watch his competitors, but he knows they watch him — and often talk about him on their shows. “I know people that don’t like me watch the show,” he says, including people watching in the hopes of finding new ways to accuse Hannity — and Fox — of being an extension of the Trump White House. “We know they exist. That’s kind of a chilling environment when you know groups hire people to monitor shows for the purpose of finding one word, one phrase, one sentence that they can take out of context, attack your advertisers, silence your voice.”

It’s about an hour before Hannity’s show, and his phone is blowing up with breaking news — he’s got to finish his opening segment, change clothes and endure time in the chair for hair and makeup. But I’ve got one more question.

On the table in front of him, Hannity has two phones. One, he says, is just for his kids. I decide to ask one more time about his access to the Oval Office. “Is that other phone the one the president calls?”

“Nice try,” Hannity says with a smirk, and we’re done. He heads to the elevator, saying hello to a cleaning woman working nearby, and shouts to the Fox publicity exec escorting me as he steps onto the elevator: “No more interviews.”